July 15, 2014

Bob Stanley's Book:Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!: The Story of Pop from Bill Haley to Beyoncé

Whether you agree with Bob Stanley's priorities or not I think in this paragraph the whole attitude to contemporary music is perfectly encapsulated:

"For
all that’s changed in the 59 years since Bill Haley, one thing was the
same before and has remained the same ever since: If you wait long
enough, just about any pop fan will come to lament the current state of
pop."

In his new pop music history Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!, which mounts its British Invasion this month, Bob Stanley doesn’t shy from wielding the R-word to bash those who fetishize the rusty old cornerstones of rock at the expense of the shinier hallmarks of pop. Though pop-leaning critics have ascended to prime perches at places like the New York Times, TheNew Yorker,NPR, and Slate,
Stanley warns in his introduction that “rockism still exists” and
mourns the fact that “disco and large swathes of black and electronic
music have been virtually ignored by traditional pop histories.” In case
his allegiances weren’t clear, the American edition comes covered in
bubblegum pink, topped with controls that resemble those of an iPod, and
subtitled with the good news that though TheStory of Pop Music may kick off with Bill Haley, it leads up to the coming of Beyoncé.

But that introduction and this shiny packaging (redesigned from the British version) may leave some pop fans confused at what follows.

Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! does chronicle the emergence of disco (whose legacy hardly needs explaining anymore in the era of Daft Punk, EDM, and The 20/20 Experience), the importance of Motown and Philly soul, and the influence of house music pioneers like Larry Levan and the recently departed Frankie Knuckles.
But the book’s staggering eclecticism only makes it all the more
disappointing when Stanley falls into some of the same pitfalls he
cautions about, failing to grasp the appeal of large swaths of hip-hop,
and, more fundamentally, structuring itself around the familiar story of
rock. In other words, it’s a reminder of how it is easy to call
yourself an “anti-rockist” and still find yourself skewing subtly
conservative.

Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! starts its history in 1955. That’s because that’s when Billboard first
published what became the Hot 100 (previously it charted album sales,
radio plays, and jukeboxes separately) and when Haley’s “Rock Around the
Clock” hit No. 1.

In some ways this makes sense—both events were
watersheds in the history of pop, and aren’t far from the invention of
the teenager as a target market, the proliferation of televisions in
American homes, and the introduction of the LP record.

But while 1955
may mark the rise of rock ’n’ roll as a popular force, to say Bill Haley
marks the beginning of modern pop is to concede to rock history’s
conventional wisdom.

What about Tin Pan Alley, the Grand Ole Opry, and
vaudeville? What about names like Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Robert
Johnson, Bessie Smith, Sophie Tucker, and Eva Tanguay?

Frank Sinatra’s Columbus Day riot, which prefigured Beatlemania in its
throngs of squealing teens, is only a footnote.

(And don’t even think
about the smash of 1909.). Perhaps no one would expect Stanley to trace pop back to the first prehistoric flute,
but context helps. It’s hard not to wince when Stanley writes, “It
seemed like Elvis came from nowhere, and that was pretty much the case.”

Part of this might be explained by the fact that Stanley is British.
It’s true that the story of pop music is in large part “the story of the
intertwining pop culture of the United States and the United Kingdom,”
as Stanley writes, but it’s especially true when it comes to
the rock era.

Stanley keeps an eye on both sides of the pond
throughout—as they close in on each other in the ’60s and grow apart
again—and the time he spends dwelling on the British charts will be
alternately intriguing (a glimpse of an alternate pop history) and
puzzling to those with American backgrounds.

Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!
reserves twice as much real estate for introducing British pop star
Billy Fury as it does for Chuck Berry, as it argues that Fury was the
blueprint for the British pop star. Discussing Phil Spector, Stanley
interweaves his story with the equally tragic tale of his transatlantic
rival, the record producer Joe Meek.

The gap between the book’s English-accented view of pop history and the
one most Americans will be used to grows larger as the book goes on.

Movements like glam and what Stanley calls “new pop” (New Romantics and
synthpoppers like Adam and the Ants and the Human League) are remembered
as earthshaking, though the earth they shook was mostly in the British
Isles. One of the book’s longest sections is dedicated to the explosion
of house and electronic dance music in England in the late 1980s, which
led to the so-called Second Summer of Love and plays out over multiple
chapters.

Stanley is a member of the indie dance band Saint Etienne,
which formed in the wake of that summer, so it makes sense that these
events would have an outsized influence on him. But though many of us
Yankees might be surprised to see this period given twice as much space
as grunge, we would be wise to listen up: We may have mostly missed out
on all those smiley-face T-shirts, but these strains of EDM are becoming more and more a part of the American pop DNA. (Not to mention something like Yeezus.)

Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! is not a short book at about 600 pages, but
given the scope of the subject, Stanley rarely has the space to put
forth compelling arguments about more established stars.

How could you
change someone’s mind about Bowie or Britney if you’ve only got a couple
of pages?

He has more luck with the Bee Gees, who get their own
chapter.

Still, though it’s more of a survey course, he manages to get
in some good lines. Joni Mitchell’s The Hissing of Summer Lawns, he notes, is “maybe the most self-descriptive album title in all pop, apart from Trogglodynamite
by the Troggs.”

Sketching a picture of Elvis Costello, he writes he
“wrote pun-packed songs while singing as if he was standing in a
fridge.” Because he is a musician, Stanley also drops some musicological
knowledge—which should please Ted Gioia—while making the equally admirable call to comment on which singers and band members were (or were not) super-cute. Like it or not, this is an important part of pop history.

Stanley fails to see any political significance at
all in gangsta rap (something that’s perhaps harder to do 5,000 miles
from Compton). “By the end of the nineties hip hop had become part of
the furniture,” he writes, acknowledging only that the genre “continues
to make money, whether it’s inspiring or not.” Ice-T gets a mention, but
there’s no such luck for Nas, while Tupac is dismissed in an aside for
being humorless.

It’s a shame the book doesn’t see shades of Phil Spector and Joe Meek
in Timbaland and Pharrell Williams. (And despite the subtitle, he
barely discusses Beyoncé.)

Its take on 21st-century pop in
general is remarkably declinist, while failing to justify some of its
most basic assertions. “With such a choice of influences readily
available, it will be much harder to create a brand-new form of music,”
Stanley argues, as if the exact opposite couldn’t also be the case.

For
all that’s changed in the 59 years since Bill Haley, one thing was the
same before and has remained the same ever since: If you wait long
enough, just about any pop fan will come to lament the current state of
pop.

I prefer to fondly remember the book that
quoted the wisdom of Leonard Bernstein, 400 pages earlier: “I think
this music has something terribly important to tell us adults,”
Bernstein said, “and I think we would be wise not to behave like
ostriches about it.”